State of GameSalad on 7-19-2017 (Web Version Semi-open Beta)

Comments

I went in did a few tries, it d' be cool if we can import our existing projects and work there. Or, later every project is on cloud where we can just work with a team of people and fellow developers (say for me, I do the logics and my partner do the graphics)

@NKBDL you can load existing projects, if you've published them (at least most projects).

If you check under the 'Projects' menu item along the left, then click on the 'Published Projects' tab.

Clicking on the 'Import into your project library' will pull your project into the tool.

The app lies right now and says it will tell you when it's ready, but it doesn't yet. You will need to hit refresh after you hit that button a couple of times to see the update. (Click on the 'Project Library' link before refresh.

Also, because of the way projects sync to the database, you can actually have multiple people working on the same project. Right now you'd have to share the same login to do that, but eventually, we would add the ability to invite people to your project as needed.

The bad thing is you can't publish your projects back to the publishing system yet. That's something we'll be adding in later next month.

After a bit of testing, I must say i'm really impressed with this early beta. They got a lot done in a short amount of time. Being able to work simultaneous in the cloud with others and having it sync automatically is wonderful. I can now see the big potential for this tool.

The UI enhancements for sorting, being able to see an actors attributes such as X,Y values, RGB values etc without clicking through several screens, and zooming is very nice. Although it is a little slow right now to load views (probably due to beta server or code).

They keep updating the creator , they really work fast , i left it for a couple of days now i come to see new things .

Toggle library , toggle inspector , coloured behaviours (thank god) , attributes are displayed with their type , expand/compact , my imported project didn't work at first but now i can edit the behaviours, using decimals in the expression editor , copy paste behaviours, behaviour tabs no longer take ages to hide/show , they now show with a click. I just hope they do something about the behaviour's size sooner than later , Rules take the whole working space , i'm sure they can improve it , but right now it really is great. Cant wait to see more ! (dark ui /snap to grid/colour palette will make my day )

Regarding performance i know that html5 can handle big games i'v seen live examples with another web tool , so i'm waiting with patience but i'm still worried if they will do it or not, i hope Gamesalad doesn't turn into "make simple games" type of engine for education purposes only , cause we can actually make big complex games with it.

So in case you were wondering, the import of large projects is a server issue and not a "tool" issue.

We're trying an experiment using Amazon Lambda to process the imports (I was hoping that we could eventually move publishing to Amazon lambda as well).

Unfortunately, Lambda has some hard limits on disk space (512MB) and processing time (5 minutes). So if your project is either larger than 512MB or takes longer than 5 minutes to upload to the project database, it won't work. I'm leaving things as they are for now, because it's 'good enough' for the beta and for school that will be using this with smaller projects.

As for the long loading times during navigation, we traced some of that to a network call. Basically we were checking user credentials against the server every time someone switched views. So the further you were away from our auth server, the longer navigation between views took. We've adjusted how often we check, so it shouldn't be a problem. There are still some navigation delays based on rendering time (some inefficient stuff I did to get a faster release).

We'll be fixing both of these issue, but there are some major bugs to get through first.

@Zwire - The new tool has all of that functionality. One of the reasons for building the new tool is that both native tools were built upon bloated code; this makes adding new features extremely time-consuming and it's a difficult process. The benefit of having this new online tool is a new, streamlined code base & updates no longer have to be pushed through installs - pushing updates is practically instant compared to how it use to be done. Overall, fixing/adding functionality will both be much quicker. I'd recommend hopping in the new tool if you haven't already!

@BigDave said:@adent42
huge relief!
most projects shouldn't be bigger than 512 mb - which would also exclude them from an android release (100 mb limit)

True, but some are and should be that size, or else you end up with nothing but small (and often unambitious) projects. It's only because GS doesn't support android expansion files that we cant have projects larger than 100mb.

Hope to see it supported in the future, because the web version keeps looking better and better.

@BigDave said:@adent42
huge relief!
most projects shouldn't be bigger than 512 mb - which would also exclude them from an android release (100 mb limit)

True, but some are and should be that size, or else you end up with nothing but small (and often unambitious) projects. It's only because GS doesn't support android expansion files that we cant have projects larger than 100mb.

Hope to see it supported in the future, because the web version keeps looking better and better.

No fucking way!!!

My project is almost done and is around 350 mb, 1.5 years of work in it and more than $10.000 and now Im hearing I cant publish on android?

@Braydon_SFX said:@Zwire - The new tool has all of that functionality. One of the reasons for building the new tool is that both native tools were built upon bloated code; this makes adding new features extremely time-consuming and it's a difficult process. The benefit of having this new online tool is a new, streamlined code base & updates no longer have to be pushed through installs - pushing updates is practically instant compared to how it use to be done. Overall, fixing/adding functionality will both be much quicker. I'd recommend hopping in the new tool if you haven't already!

are you guys trying to compete with Construct 3? its completely online. But they are way ahead of you guys with you beta, there close to a final version, you guys have a lot to catch up on and you need to have steam support for mac and pc.

@paulkerry honestly no. We announced it independently and I only found out about Construct 3 shortly after we started.

I'm guessing we arrived at the same conclusions independently. HTML5 as a technology is good enough for apps and is cross-platform by default. Eventually this tool will replace the desktop versions of the app (we're gonna wrap our HTML5 but give it an "offline" mode).

If you want steam support for PC, you can just an HTML5 exported game in nw.js just like you would a Construct game (We don't support the steam achievement APIs yet, but that's something I'd like to add on). We'd love to port the native engine to PC as well, but there's a lot of other stuff to do first.

Our product will be coming out of beta soon for education and by the end of the year it will support most, if not all, the same features as the native versions.

@Two.E sorry about that, we're trying to make things more manageable by narrowing down to one code base. If you aren't on the beta yet, you should give it a shot (ping @ForumNinja. It's not quite "there" yet, but it's got a lot of cool stuff that I think will make the transition worth i!

@adent42 When the final of the online version is released will there be video tutorials pointing out the differences and additions/omissions from the Mac and Windows versions, so us loyal old-timers can get up to speed quickly and be productive ASAP?

@PhilipCC said:@adent42 When the final of the online version is released will there be video tutorials pointing out the differences and additions/omissions from the Mac and Windows versions, so us loyal old-timers can get up to speed quickly and be productive ASAP?

If this is focussed for education. Some top notch video tutorials would be essential......What teacher would pick up the new GS without those resources?

In my opinion the resources and tutorial are equally important as the tool itself.

@PhilipCC said:@adent42 When the final of the online version is released will there be video tutorials pointing out the differences and additions/omissions from the Mac and Windows versions, so us loyal old-timers can get up to speed quickly and be productive ASAP?

I'm prepping a video that will introduce those transitioning to the new tool. It will cover the new UI, how it's different compared to the native tools, and also showcase some of the nice new features.

What kind of time frame are we looking at for the eventual removal of the desktop app @adent42 ? If the native creators are eventually going to support .exe, does that mean they aren't going away anytime soon?

I only ask because right now the beta web creator cannot handle my main project (file size limit on servers) so it's a bit scary to hear that without being able to test it in the web creator, I will be forced to move to it at an undetermined time without the knowledge that my project will even run. To be a bit dramatic, I am in a potential situation to lose thousands and thousands of hours of work right at the final stretch of development on a multi-year project. So a time frame would be great